Arthur C Brooks: Moment 163: Happiness Expert Reveals The One Type Of Person You Should NEVER Date

00:02The biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their doppelganger. They look for their clone. You shouldn't look for your clone, you should look for your compliment. Why? Because you'll be happier when you complete each other. That's when people who complete each other, you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and extrovert, if they learn to appreciate each other. So it's not, you know, hammer and tongs all the time for the differences. But when people, for example, one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people, you know, satisfactory dating experiences, people have more and more and more choice, but they're more likely to say they're not satisfied to the people they're dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating. It's because they'll set up a dating profile saying, I vote this way. I like this music. I live here. I like these things.

00:46I want somebody with these preferences. And they get somebody who's their sibling, which is, as my adult children will remind me is not hot. Difference is hot. It's so true because I never would have said I want someone that is spiritual, that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she'll read and she just believes in it all. And it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted, but I absolutely love it. And that means that she's actually pulled me into her world. She's made me more spiritual. She's made me believe in things I never would have believed before. And she's completing me in that regard.

01:23It's really great. It's really great. I mean, you've cracked the code in that way. And finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a good relationship and not wishing the person were more like you. This is very important that this is a relationship killer, is that wishing that your partner were more like you is just a form of egotism. Everyone tries to change their partner, though, don't they?

01:45Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. There's the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't. And, and, um, husbands are frustrated because they thought their wives would never change. And they do. I don't know. There is truth in that. Relationships and love. How important is this as a subject for happiness? It's the number one area of interest of my students. Really? My average student is 28 years old. So they're MBA students or master's students. They've all gone through college.

02:13They've gone to work and they've come back to the Harvard business school. You have to have some business experience to get the business master's degree. And this is the number one thing they want to talk about. They want to learn about it scientifically. They want to learn about the neurochemical cascade of what's actually happening in your brain and at what point you can't control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the business school about CEOs who are dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates. I mean, it's a classic theme. And the last line of the case study is always the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going, I don't know what happened. And so we look at brain scans and say, this is what happened.

02:50And you can see it in the brain. Kind of. I mean, somebody who's really in love has brain activity that looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addicts brain scan. I mean, your brain is, if you're at a certain point in the falling in love process, your brain is captured. So I mean, at the beginning when people meet, there's a hormonal reaction with testosterone and estrogen, which are sex hormones, obviously. And when people see somebody who's really attractive, that's why they want to look attractive because that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens. After that, you see a big increase in noradrenaline, aka epinephrine and dopamine levels. So you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That's sort of the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade that's going on when you're falling in love. After that, you see a dip in serotonin, which is really interesting. So serotonin, we think about as the neuromodulator of peace and happiness, which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when they feel that it's an imbalance. So people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning that you maintain a higher level of serotonin.

03:56And that's all really controversial still, I mean, because we don't really understand that very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love, that they're more likely to be ruminative and infatuated. Remember that part of the brain, the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that does rumination, it'll be more active when serotonin is low. And so serotonin will be low, so you start ruminating on the other person. That's when the infatuation part of the relationship really kicks in. And then you get to the point of attachment, which involves oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attached to the other person, very profoundly attached to the other person. That's intensely pleasurable. So it's like... And the longer you let it go, the harder it is for your brain not to be really really captured you wouldn't go to a methamphetamine addict and say why did you buy methamphetamine that's illegal they'll be like i'm an addict i'm a junkie it's the same thing as when somebody's sleeping with a subordinate are people that are in love and in relationships happier statistically no on the contrary because being in love especially in the early stages of being in love is not associated with what we would associate with

05:04actual happiness because it has jealousy, tons of jealousy, which is, you know, the rumination part. When your serotonin levels are really low, it's hard for you to say, ah, it feels so great. You feel euphoric and you like it in its own way. But if you kept that, if you stayed in that stage, you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable because there's jealousy. There's surveillance behaviors are really common. And, you know, there's nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner, that's when I'm happiest. Nobody likes that, but people tend to do that because a lot of your brain is basically saying, I'm trying to figure out if this is somebody who's going to betray me, back to evolution. Is this somebody who's going to wander off and raise somebody else's kids? Is this somebody who's going to be, when I don't know it, carrying somebody else's baby? Which is how men and women actually, they tend to express their sexual jealousy in those two. Interesting, there's a guy at University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy.

06:01The most jealousy-provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else. For women, it's an image of their intimate partner saying, I love you, to somebody else. And the reason is because traditionally or evolutionarily, women have to be worried that their partner is going to go take care of somebody else's children. And men have to be worried that they're not the actual father of the children, which, according to some estimates, is 15% of paternity, which is misattributed worldwide.

06:32makes sense that's a lot yeah no it makes sense so fortunately my kids look like me yeah i'm one that's adopted she doesn't look like me this idea in chapter four of your book of focusing less on yourself leads to happiness how can you prove that's the case so there's a there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show this using human subjects and so one of the classic uh experiments there's these guys at northwestern there's a fabulous social psychologist named adam Weitz. I don't know if you've had him on your show before. He's a really impressive and innovative social psychologist. And he did an experiment where he took the undergraduate students. You always use the undergraduate pool at your university because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks. And he put them into three groups. One had to do moral deeds. They had to do random acts of kindness. One had to do moral thoughts. They had to sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people. And one had to do self-care things. Go do something that really makes you feel good.

07:25And they looked at their happiness over a series of weeks with these interventions. And they found that moral deeds were happier than moral thoughts, and moral thoughts were happier than self-care. That's what they found. In other words, and again, this is basically showing the same thing that, you know, I did research for years and years and years about happiness and charitable giving. If you're lonely, the most important thing you can do is volunteer.

07:49It just is. If you give money away, statistically, you're more likely to make more money next year. Incredible investment strategy. And the reason is because you see yourself as an agent of positive change. You're empowered when you're helping other people. When you give love, you get love. That's the bottom line is what it comes down to. And so all of these experiments find kind of the same thing. If you put two groups randomly selected of people, one group is playing board games and the other is helping sixth graders with their math.

08:19the ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward i mean this is just helping other people helps you not focus on the psychodrama inside steve's head and it makes it so that life actually has a transcendent aspect to it you get perspective you get peace and furthermore you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you want to be We'll be right back.